WHAT a touching and solemn picture this is. Doesn’t it speak to us as we look at it, for everyone who looks at it feels that a human being has broken through the ice, gone down in the cold, dark waters and drowned.
How pleasant and healthy it is too, for children to go on the ice when free from duties, to play, to slide and to skate!
The eyes do shine brightly from under the cap and the cheeks do glow in the bracing air. but there is need of caution especially as the weather gets warmer, and the ice gets more brittle. Then there is danger also about going on ice not thick enough to bear up, and one can hear and read every winter of many persons, young and old who found an unexpected, cold, watery grave.
To those whose eyes have been opened by the Lord Jesus, many people around them seem to be walking on a thin crust of ice, thinking they are secure and journeying heavenward, because they lead an outwardly honest and religious life, when in fact they are dead in trespasses and sins. They take no heed to the word of the Lord Jesus in which He says: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Ponder it well, dear reader, and prove yourself, whether your faith stands in the wisdom of men, or in the power and love of God; whether you trust your religious feeling and good works, doing no one any harm, living honest before all, keeping Sunday and going to church, saying your prayers, etc., or whether you trust God who sent His beloved Son into the world to save you, and whose blood has washed your sins away. If it is the former it is like a thin crust of ice that will sooner or later let you down. Oh, how dangerous! Is this the way to heaven? Has God asked this of you? Why, my dear friend, if you could go to heaven on that road, then did Christ die in vain. All those sufferings of Christ on the cross would be an extravagance on God’s part and quite useless if you can save yourself.
Everything in this life is uncertain, like the sheet of ice. on the water. And, like the ice cracks before it breaks and lets you down, so the sickness that comes on you at times, tells you how quickly you may be taken away by death. God sends out His warnings. No one knows our dangers so well as God, and therefore (knowing His great love for us)’ we ought to be warned when He warns.
If the faithful dog of our picture looks with longing and some pain after his master who had broken through the ice and disappeared under the dark waters, how much more are God s’ people moved, and above all God’s own heart, to see His creatures going on in a careless and indifferent way, heeding neither His warning nor His invitation until Some day it may be said, “he died’,” or “she died.” But, dear reader, we know from God’s word that not only is it appointed unto men once to die, but after death the judgment.
Messages of God’s Love 3/8/1908